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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Scientific Linux 6.3 Beta 1 has been released

Pat Riehecky has announced the availability of the first beta version of Scientific
Linux 6.3, a distribution built from source packages of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and enhanced with extra applications useful in academic
environments: "There should be no expectation that a
'yum' upgrade to SL 6.3 will work.
A new install is the recommended method to move from 'sl6rolling'(this
alpha release) and the released 'SL 6.3'. Major changes the upstream
vendor made: LibreOffice - OpenOffice.org has been replaced with
LibreOffice. The LibreOffice packages 'provide' the right packages to
maintain compatibility for Kickstart and yum installs; Anaconda -
Anaconda now alerts users to the beta status of a release when it is
tagged appropriately, upstream has added this functionality and we are
taking advantage of it for the beta cycle...."

Scientific Linux is a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux, co-developed
by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization
for Nuclear Research (CERN). Although it aims to be fully compatible
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it also provides additional packages not
found in the upstream product; the most notable among these are various
file systems, including Cluster Suite and Global File System (GFS),
FUSE, OpenAFS, Squashfs and Unionfs, wireless networking support with
Intel wireless firmware, MadWiFi and NDISwrapper, Sun Java and Java
Development Kit (JDK), the lightweight IceWM window manager, R - a
language and environment for statistical computing, and the Alpine email
client.